A lot of comparisons have been done, and will continue to be done, between ZFS and other filesystems. People tend to focus on performance, features, and CLI tools as they are easier to compare. I thought I’d take a moment to look at differences in the code complexity between UFS and ZFS. It is well known within the kernel group that UFS is about as brittle as code can get. 20 years of ongoing development, with feature after feature being bolted on tends to result in a rather complicated system. Even the smallest changes can have wide ranging effects, resulting in a huge amount of testing and inevitable panics and escalations. And while SVM is considerably newer, it is a huge beast with its own set of problems. Since ZFS is both a volume manager and a filesystem, we can use this script written by Jeff to count the lines of source code in each component. Not a true measure of complexity, but a reasonable approximation to be sure. Running it on the latest version of the gate yields:
------------------------------------------------- UFS: kernel= 46806 user= 40147 total= 86953 SVM: kernel= 75917 user=161984 total=237901 TOTAL: kernel=122723 user=202131 total=324854 ------------------------------------------------- ZFS: kernel= 50239 user= 21073 total= 71312 -------------------------------------------------
The numbers are rather astounding. Having written most of the ZFS CLI, I found the most horrifying number to be the 162,000 lines of userland code to support SVM. This is more than twice the size of all the ZFS code (kernel and user) put together! And in the end, ZFS is about 1/5th the size of UFS and SVM. I wonder what those ZFS numbers will look like in 20 years…